There, he studied under Dr. Solomon Berson, a physician, and the medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow, whose lab was deeply involved in the study of insulin. In 1977, she became the first U.S.-born woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for developing the radioimmunoassay, a technique that uses radioactive isotopes to analyze biological samples.
Jesse Roth was born on Aug. 5, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, the second of three children of Paul Roth, who co-owned a clothing company in Manhattan’s garment district, and Rebecca (Milberg) Roth, who managed the home.
Attending public schools, Jesse was drawn to science at an early age, he told The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Yet as an undergraduate at Columbia University in the early 1950s, he majored in art history.
He went on to attend medical school, enrolling at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx to avoid the antisemitism that shaped admissions at other institutions in the 1950s. “If you were Jewish and you were from New York, you had a tough time getting into medical school,” Roth said in the journal interview.
He was a member of the inaugural class there, graduating in 1959, and completed his medical residency at Barnes Hospital (now Barnes-Jewish Hospital) in St. Louis.
Roth was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, providing medical care to injured demonstrators. The NIH Catalyst, a journal published by the National Institutes of Health, reported that he was one of five NIH volunteers to answer President Lyndon Johnson’s call for help in assessing whether Southern hospitals were in compliance with federal desegregation mandates or flouting them.
Roth met his future wife, Susan Laufer, a children’s book author, in 1968, when she was a teacher for Head Start, the federally funded preschool program. At the time, he was providing pro bono medical services for the program.
In addition to their daughter Alisa, his wife survives him, along with another daughter, Alana Roth; a son, Alex; three grandchildren; and a brother, Joshua.
